An Evaluation of Fortune Telling Tradition as One of the Folk Culture Practice

Abstract

The history of fortunetelling is as old as the history of the mankind. In this paper, we intend to appreciate fortunetelling as a tool for folklore ad explicate its social psychological and cultural background. Our subtitles are the definition of fortunetelling, fortunetelling in old cultures, fortunetelling according to İslam, the main types of fortunetelling in Turco-islam vvorld, the charateristics of fortunetellers' identity and the validity of fortunetelling, the pyschological and sociological dimension of fortunetelling as a tradition, the analysis of fortunetelling tradition in terms of folklore. We come to the conclusion that this application is not limited vvith the geographical and timely dimensions and involues, anybody coming from any kind of education and any kind of social class. The roots and the spirit of this tradition remain the same, although the methods change. Today, the old methods of fortunetelling have some parallels with the modem fortunetelling vveb pages on the net. The important thing here is the cultural response that this parallelism provides for the people. Man might face uncertainties and problems in his/her life. What brought the tradition of fortunetelling to our day is its enigma, the urge to solve it forexample. the sense of curiousity and desire to overcome the problems.